You have to laugh at some of the current terminology used by the National Health Service in describing job cuts.

Downsizing, staff rationalisation, ratio reduction, cost saving efficiencies, market lean workforce and effective staff redeployment (to the dole office) are just a few examples of management speak which allow the masters of the universe to think of us all as jelly beans and potato chips. Where is ‘V’ when we need him?

Smiling health minister Andrew Lansley puts the knife in the National Health Service. Who needs the Grim Reaper when you’ve got this snowy haired rider of the apocalypse riding roughshod over a national institution.

The general public seems blissfully unaware that the Conservative, sorry, Coalition Government is privatising the National Health Service.

Health minister Andrew Lansley has agreed to the abolition of primary care trusts in favour of handing the financial reins to GP consortia by 2013. This train has already left the station.

I’m sure most people aren’t aware that GPs aren’t NHS employees but privately-run businesses that trusts pay to treat local people.

It would be naive to think that clinicians can’t be as self-serving and devisive as anyone else , especially when the Government has said that GPs who perform well will be financially rewarded.

So, we are giving these private businesses billions of pounds of public money to, no doubt, employ other private sector companies at the cost of thousands of NHS jobs and further line their pockets.

I’m not blinkered enough to see that there isn’t huge duplication and wastage in primary care trusts and their top heavy management structures but at least they were impartial and could impose performance targets on GP practices.

Margaret Thatcher must be putting on her glad rags and shaking out the blue rinse bottle at the prospect of David Cameron and Co. finishing off her handiwork. I can feel a 1980s revival coming